Paradoxes and Oxymorons
John Ashbery * Track #1 On Shadow Train
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Paradoxes and Oxymorons by John Ashbery
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John AshberyAbout
Megan Snyder-Camp writes of this poem and Ashbery in general, “His poems don’t snowball toward an epiphany, nor do they stick to the story. They veer as the mind often does, and so within each of his poems readers encounter a diversity of images, tones, and sonic elements…His poems glean energy thro...
Paradoxes and Oxymorons Annotated
This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.
Look at it talking to you. You look out a window
Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don’t have it.
You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.
The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot.
What’s a plain level? It is that and other things,
Bringing a system of them into play. Play?
Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be
A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern,
As in the division of grace these long August days
Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know
It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters.
It has been played once more. I think you exist only
To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren’t there
Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem
Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.